Katja Hoyer: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The nudity cult from East Germany, FKK, why is that so strong? It catches on, but there’s also this extreme prudishness to communism. How did that picture fit together? Yes, that’s a very good question. I’ve been pondering that myself for quite some time. The whole FKK, the free body culture, I don’t know how it’s actually translated into English, but this nudist culture is actually much older than East Germany. It’s something that came out of the 19th century. Again, you could ask the same question there. You have a very prudish, conservative society that develops this kind of culture. I think, in part, it is a counter culture to that. The idea that this comes out of the people themselves and is an expression of people’s freedom, this feeling of just jumping into the ocean naked, being surrounded by nature, being together with others. That stripping of clothes means stripping of class boundaries, of politics, of culture, in a way, and everyone looks and is the same. I think that’s partially the appeal of that particularly there. On top of that, it’s just the pragmatic reason, but the Baltic Sea was in the East largely, most of it. The nicer stretch of Germany’s coastline, just in terms of developing any beach culture, really, was in the former GDR. Therefore, you naturally have the landscape that lends itself to that. There’s a bit of that in the West as well. When you go to certain areas, say, for instance, the English Garden in Munich is quite famous even today. Sometimes you see people sunbathing in the nude or topless there because there are pockets of that, but it’s never that mass movement that it is in the East. I think that comes out of those two factors that I just explained. If you were to make the case that the rule of Angela Merkel was in some significant way influenced by her East German background, do you think that’s true? Is there a case to be made there? If so, what is it?…

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